ENB121 Lecture 4: ENG 4
encouraged if at all possible. When a man makes a few billion
dollars, he still starts looking around for a museum to build a
gallery for or a newspaper to buy. No civilization we think
worth studying, or whose relics we think worth visiting, existed
without what amounts to an English department—texts that
mattered, people who argued about them as if they mattered,
and a sense of shame among the wealthy if they couldn’t talk
about them, at least a little, too. It’s what we call civilization.
Even if we read books and talk about them for four years, and
then do something else more obviously remunerative, it won’t
be time wasted. We need the humanities not because they will
produce shrewder entrepreneurs or kinder C.E.O.s but because,
as that first professor said, they help us enjoy life more and
endure it better. The reason we need the humanities is because
we’re human. That’s enough.
Photograph by Riccardo Venturi/Contrasto/Redux
• Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New
Yorker since 1986. He is the author of “The Table Comes First.”
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Dive into the world of literature with The New Yorker’s weekly fiction
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